From ‘Grey Democracy’ to the ‘Green New Deal’: Post-war Democracy and the Hegemonic Imaginary of Material Politics in Western Europe

Abstract

even nostalgia for the post-war years, which is widespread in scholarship and the public sphere in Western Europe, makes the era a key reference point in efforts to understand the development of politics and society since 1945. In scholarship, the period ’ s resonance is readily apparent in the sparkling superlatives that have been used to describe it. In his seminal history of the short 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm describes the 1950s and 1960s as ‘ golden years ’ . 1 This characterization emphasizes the stark contrast, especially in Western Europe, between the widespread af fl uence of the post-war decades and the preceding ‘ age of catastrophe ’ , a period of 30 years that saw not only the great depression but also the two world wars. Already in the mid-1950s, West Germans began to refer to the prosperity their country had attained so soon after the devastation they faced at the end of World War II as an ‘ economic miracle ’ ( Wirtschaftswunder ). In France, the economist Jean Fourastie famously termed the period from the end of the war until the 1970s the ‘ Thirty Glorious Years ’ ( trentes glorieuses ), and similar char-acterizations can be found with regard to Italy and the Netherlands. The same sort of superlative language has been re-appropriated to describe the progress of post-war democracy as well. In 1953, the German political scientists Christian-Claus Baer and